Cliffs: die and IHS tricks bring thermals down, boost behavior up. Performs as expected based on what we know about 8th and 9th generation Intel.
My opinion:
This is proof the 9th Generation was a dark time in the history of Intel. Be it due to yields, lack of marketing, lack of executive forethought, there was only one worthwhile CPU in the entire stack to own, the i9-9900k. And even that was tainted by the fact it only exists because Intel stole hyperthreading from the i7 only to create the i9.
If we had been given 10th Generation instead of 9th, Intel would be in a much better place than it is today, from both the consumer enthusiasts and media perspective.
It seems Intel has learned from their mistakes, as we have the 10th generation as it is today.
It’s unfortunate that it comes as too little, too late, as they are barely beating Ryzen 4000 to the market, and it’s likely this series will finally beat Intel in every metric.
As it stands, Intel needs to drop prices a bit for them to be attractive for enthusiast users and to be recommended more. People will still buy the F out of them, though, because it has Apple magic.
The forced bifurcation between i3/i5/i7/i9 was a really bad move for Intel, at least for the (admittedly small) enthusiast segment. The whole lineup just felt terrible – as you said, unless you got a 9900k you felt like you were getting cheated at least a little given the costs involved.
It’s good that Intel is trying to turn things around in whatever way they practically can and 10th gen is a pretty decent holdover release, but if 11th + 12th gens don’t bring meaningful improvement beyond what the tricks they employed for the 10th gen are capable of, it’s going to be like the Pentium 4 all over again.
Speaking of Apple, Intel may lose them as a customer if they don’t step up their game. In short-moderate length bursts, Apple’s current A-series SoCs can trade blows with Intel laptop CPUs on a lot of benchmarks and even best them in common things like JavaScript, and that’s within the constraints of a phone/tablet… imagine what a next-gen A-series designed for laptop/desktop with a much higher power budget and proper cooling would be capable of.
Intel reminds me of how some companies can’t adapt to the market place but keep on doing the same old thing just cause it’s how they been doing it for so long.
To their credit, they did try to get into the mobile arena with x86 phone CPUs, even if that failed spectacularly.
But I guess that was also a case of “keep doing the same thing” – I think their mistake there was pushing the “muscle” angle too hard, trying to sell extra power/speed as the main advantage of x86 phones/tablets. Only problem is that at that point the ARM R&D ball already had already been rolling for a while and had picked up enough momentum that SoCs caught up to phone-x86 levels and surpassed them all while drinking less power and not needing active cooling.
I’m confident the 4000 series is going to be big for AMD.
As far as Intel goes, power usage and heat aren’t that big a deal as long as the performance is there. That’s the distinguishing factor between it and the FX 9590.
I believe you feel the same way, given you have a Frontier Edition Vega.